Feasting Our Eyes: Food Films and Cultural Identity in the United States

By Laura Lindenfeld and Fabio Parasecoli

Big Night (1996), Ratatouille (2007), and Julie and Julia (2009) are more than films about foodthey serve a political purpose. In the kitchen, around the table, and in the dining room, these films use cooking and eating to explore such themes as ideological pluralism, ethnic and racial acceptance, gender equality, and class flexibilitybut not as progressively as you might think. Feasting Our Eyes takes a second look at these and other modern American food films to emphasize their conventional approaches to nation, gender, race, sexuality, and social status. Devoured visually and emotionally, these films are particularly effective defenders of the status quo.

Feasting Our Eyes looks at Hollywood films and independent cinema, documentaries and docufictions, from the 1990s to today and frankly assesses their commitment to racial diversity, tolerance, and liberal political ideas. Laura Lindenfeld and Fabio Parasecoli find women and people of color continue to be treated as objects of consumption even in these modern works and, despite their progressive veneer, American food films often mask a conservative politics that makes commercial success more likely. A major force in mainstream entertainment, American food films shape our sense of who belongs, who has a voice, and who has opportunities in American society. They facilitate the virtual consumption of traditional notions of identity and citizenship, reworking and reinforcing ingrained ideas of power.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Nov 22, 2016
• ISBN: 9780231542975

Book preview

FEASTING OUR EYES

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York   Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2017 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-54297-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lindenfeld, Laura, author. | Parasecoli, Fabio, author.

Title: Feasting our eyes: food films and cultural identity in the United States / Laura Lindenfeld and Fabio Parasecoli.

Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016008166| ISBN 9780231172509 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231172516 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Food in motion pictures. | Motion pictures—United States—History. | Food—Social aspects—United States.

Classification: LCC PN1995.9.F65 L56 2016 | DDC 791.43/6564—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016008166

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

Cover design: Lisa Hamm

Cover image: Courtesy of Photofest

CONTENTS

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Food Films and Consumption: Selling Big Night

2 Autonomy in the Kitchen? Food Films and Postfeminism

3 Magical Food, Luscious Bodies

4 Culinary Comfort: The Satiating Construction of Masculinity

5 When Weirdos Stir the Pot: Cooking Identity in Animated Movies

6 Consuming the Other: Food Films as Culinary Tourism

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

0.1   In Tampopo a woman dreams of creating the best ramen recipe

0.2   Babette’s Feast helped inaugurate the food-film genre by defining its food shots, lighting, and editing

1.1   The clash between culinary traditions is a core theme of Big Night

1.2   The timpano is a symbol of culinary heritage in Big Night

1.3   An aspiring chef struggles to negotiate success and family tradition in Today’s Special

2.1   A shared meal in Babette’s Feast creates joy and reconciliation

2.2   Emotion and sensuality are on the menu in Fried Green Tomatoes

2.3   Female chef Kate must balance personal and professional lives in No Reservations

2.4   Julie & Julia exposes the rift between the reality of daily cooking and the ideal of culinary artistry

3.1   Like Water for Chocolate explores the complex connections among food and sexuality

3.2   Food and sex render men defenseless in Woman on Top

3.3   In The Mistress of Spices an Indian sorceress is bound to her grocery store

4.1   In Eat Drink Man Woman a retired male chef negotiates his worth and masculinity through his culinary talents

4.2   Fried Green Tomatoes unpacks the struggle underlying female body images

4.3   Wine connoisseurship is a site of contested masculinity in Sideways

5.1   Ratatouille’s Remy assures children (and adults) that everybody can cook

5.2   Kung Fu Panda shows children that a full-figured body is acceptable and lovable

5.3   Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs reminds viewers that junk food is ultimately not good for them

5.4   Anton Ego in Ratatouille reveals how complicated men’s relationships with food can be

6.1   Meryl Streep plays Julia Child in Julie & Julia

6.2   Ignorance of cultural and ethnic tradition is comedic in The Joy Luck Club

6.3   Ahmad and family provide cultural mediation for viewers in Soul Food

6.4   A male Mexican chef defines his relationship with his Americanized daughters through cooking in Tortilla Soup

6.5   Soul Food’s Big Mama reflects many stereotypes about African American women and their cooking

7.1   Fast Food Nation forces viewers to face hidden aspects of the U.S. food industry

7.2   Food, Inc. takes an activist approach to changing the U.S. food system

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many hands, minds, and hearts provided important contributions to this book. I am deeply grateful to all who shared ideas, emotional support, recommendations for foodie flicks, and—of course—great food over the years.

If writing a book is anything like making a meal, working with Fabio Parasecoli was like planning the most sumptuous banquet one can imagine—even better than Babette’s Feast or The Big Night. Fabio can whip up words and ideas with the ease that Julia Child brought to the creation of a magnificent soufflé. Fabio, I will forever be grateful for your friendship and collegiality. This book would not have come to be without you. May others have the pleasure and joy of the ease, integrity, fun, and focus that I experienced in working with you.

Portions of this book struck their original roots in my dissertation. Although the book has evolved significantly since that time, its advancement was possible because of the kind and steady support I received from Jay Mechling. Jay, I still miss going to lunch with you and talking about food. How lucky was I to have you as my doctoral adviser. Gratitude goes to Kent Ono and Sarah Projanksy, who read, reviewed, and offered feedback on this work in its earliest phases of development. It was such a pleasure and an honor to work with you.

The University of Maine’s Office of Research supported this book with a summer research fellowship. The University of California, Davis supported the dissertation out of which parts of this book grew with a Dissertation Year Fellowship. I am deeply grateful for the support provided to me by both institutions.

My sincere appreciation and affection go to the colleagues and friends who supported this book. Many gave input and shared ideas over the years at meetings of the Association for the Study of Food and Society, National Communication Association, Conference on Communication and the Environment, Cultural Studies Association, and American Studies Association. Alice Julier, Psyche-Williams Forson, Charlotte Biltekoff, Anita Mannur, Carole Counihan, Warren Belasco, Arlene Voski-Avakian, and Netta Davis provided moral support and helped me to advance my thinking about identity and food in critically important ways. Special thanks to Davis-era friends Anna Kuhn, Dave & Jen Nachmanoff, Kelly Nelson, jesikah maria ross, and Erin MacDougall. Laurie Nickel, the many miles running and hours spent talking have been fundamentally influential in all that I do. At UMaine I have so many people to thank. Kathleen Bell and Shaleen Jain (my Mod Squad sustainability siblings), Gisela Hoecherl-Alden (sister coauthor of a food film paper), Jen O’Leary, Annie Langston, Nate Stormer, Naomi Jacobs, Kristin Langellier, Mike Socolow, Amy Blackstone, and Jeff St. John, you have been such steady sources of strength and kindness over the years. I have had the privilege of working with so many amazing students who have helped to enrich the thinking that went into this book. Beth, Mike, Eli, and Zeke, thank you for providing creative space for writing and wonderful food over the years.

Thanks to Rich Kilfoyle and Lucy Quimby from the bottom of my heart. You have no idea how much you have meant to me and how influential you have been in my life. Grace Noonan-Kaye, you stepped in to support me at a critical phase and offered wise guidance for focusing on the work that resulted in this book. Thank you.

To our editor, Jennifer Crewe, we are grateful for the support you provided that made this book so much better. We feel privileged to have received such supportive feedback from our reviewers and are grateful for your time and care. Jen St. John, our special thanks go out to you for your detailed edits, enthusiasm about this project, and general joie-de-vivre.

I am blessed with a supportive family that loves great food and movies. Thank you Mom and John, Katie and Kevin, Dan and Shannon, Dad and Ann, David and Lorraine, Mike and Beth, Robin and Michael for your endless support. The many meals and conversations I shared with you enrich me and my work every day. Vic and Lee, you hold a special place in my heart when it comes to food, wine, music, and friendship.

My work on this book is dedicated to Roger and Micah, my foodie guys. Micah, you were born around the time my dissertation was done, and now you can read this book and talk about food, film, and identity like an adult with dad and me. I am so incredibly proud of the person you have become. Roger, thank you for all the wonderful meals, talk of food, piles of food magazines, willingness to watch food movies (good and bad), partnership, constant source of love, and tolerance of me staring at a screen. I love you two more than words can express.

The ideas about cultural citizenship in this book were initially fleshed out in 2011 in Feasts for Our Eyes: Viewing Food Films through New Lenses, which appeared as a chapter in Food as Communication, Communication as Food, edited by J. Cramer, C. Greene, and L. Walters (New York: Peter Lang). Portions of chapter 6 appeared in 2007 in "Visiting the Mexican American Family: Tortilla Soup as Culinary Tourism," Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4, no. 3 (2007): 303–320. Other portions were published in Digging Down to the Roots: On the Radical Potential of Documentary Food Films, Radical History Review, no. 110 (2011): 155–160; and "Can Documentary Food Films like Food Inc. Achieve Their Promise?" Environmental Communication 4, no. 3 (2010): 378–386.

—Laura Lindenfeld

First of all, I want to thank my coauthor and friend Laura Lindenfeld, with whom I have swapped ideas and insights about media in general and cinema in particular since we first met, years ago, through the Association for the Study of Food and Society. Who would have thought we’d be writing a book together when I was enjoying lobster and seafood with her wonderful family (hi Roger and Micah!) in her Maine home! Working with her has been a pleasure. Neither of us has been proprietary about our work, and we’ve always felt free to cut, add, and edit as we felt was best. A rare and precious experience.

Thank you also to Anne Bellows, my dissertation adviser at Hohenheim University, Germany (now at Syracuse University, New York), who allowed me to write about food and masculinities in blockbuster films and offered crucial guidance through the whole doctoral process.

A special thank you goes to my family and friends in Rome, as well as to Doran Ricks, who sat through many films he may not have been necessarily interested in.

I want to acknowledge all the students with whom I have shared my passion for food and film at Città del Gusto, New York University, the University of Gastronomic Sciences, and now the New School. Over the years they have pushed me to examine topics that would not have occurred to me, making me aware of new material and keeping me on my toes. Those courses helped me think through many of the issues we discuss in this book.

Much gratitude and affection goes to my friends in the Association for the Study of Food and Society, which I have always considered my intellectual (and emotional) home in academia, as well to my colleagues at the New School, who have provided a great working environment for me to grow as a teacher and a scholar. In particular, I want to thank Bea Banu, my partner in crime in the Food Studies program, who had my back when I had to double down on writing and revising the book, and Laura Di Bianco, who taught Food and Film at the New School, with whom I had great and useful conversations.

Portions of this book were part of my doctoral dissertation, Food and Men in Cinema: An Exploration of Gender in Blockbuster Movies. Parts of chapter 5 were published in May 2013 in Projector: A Journal of Film, Media, and Culture as "When a Weirdo Stirs the Pot: Food and Masculinity in Ratatouille." Other portions appear in the journal Semiotica in an article titled Starred Cosmopolitanism: Celebrity Chefs, Documentaries, and the Circulation of Global Desire; in the chapter From Stove to Screen: Food Porn, Professional Chefs, and the Construction of Masculinity in Films, in What’s Cooking? Food, Art and Counterculture, edited by Silvia Botticelli and Margherita D’Ayala (forthcoming, University of Arkansas Press); and in Kitchen Mishaps: Performances of Masculine Domesticity in American Comedy Films, in Food, Masculinity, and Home, edited by Michelle Szabo (forthcoming, Bloomsbury).

—Fabio Parasecoli

INTRODUCTION

Food passes across any boundary you care to mention.

Salmon Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

Big Night . Ratatouille . Julie & Julia . Besides their commercial success, the common element that unites these films is that they are all about food, prepared in the kitchen, served at the table, and offered to global audiences for visual and emotional consumption. Above all, cooking and eating shape the characters’ lives and adventures, while dishes and ingredients, luscious and appealing, often steal the scene. Food looms large in contemporary cinema, even when it is not the main narrative engine, in comedies like Spanglish (Brooks, 2004), dramas like The Help (Taylor, 2011), and even gangster movies like Goodfellas (Scorsese, 1990) and Eastern Promises (Cronenberg, 2007). The presence of food in commercially successful films is far from being an exclusively U.S. phenomenon: Hollywood operates within a well-established trend that is visible at the global level. We can mention, among others, films like the Brazilian Estomago ( Estomago: A Gastronomic Story [Jorge, 2007]), the French Haute Cuisine ( Les saveurs du palais [Vincent, 2012]), the Japanese The Chef of South Polar ( Nankyoku ryôrinin [Okita, 2009]), the Indian The Lunchbox ( Dabba [Batra, 2013]), and the Spanish Mediterranean Food ( Dieta mediterránea [Oristrell, 2009]). Their themes vary, respectively, from the culinary world of a prison inmate to the story of the female chef for a French president, the adventures of the cook in an all-male scientific research base in the South Pole, the lonely existence of a widower, and the struggle of a female chef to assert herself both in her business and in her private life.

The evocative potential of the moving image is reinforced when cuisine and ingestion are used to convey dynamics and feelings that would otherwise be difficult to express visually or verbally. For this reason food has always been present in cinema, long before the release of seminal works like Tampopo (Itami, 1985) and Babette’s Feast (Axel, 1987)—often hailed as the first food films—and even before Hollywood fully embraced food as a legitimate and lucrative theme. Yet, since the early 1990s, cooking and eating have acquired unprecedented visibility in American cinema, reflecting a growing interest among moviegoers and in the movie industry. What changes in audiences, the media, and the film business have made the cinematic and narrative focus on food viable and successful? Do these developments reflect deeper trends in culture and society? In other words, why do Americans long for food on the silver screen, and what does that desire say about U.S. society? Can we talk about food films as an emergent genre focused on the topic of food, cooking, and eating that includes works as varied as Hollywood and independent narrative films, documentaries, and docufictions? And finally, how does this U.S. trend relate to larger global phenomena about food, film, and media?

These are some of the questions that Feasting Our Eyes addresses. These complex issues can be unpacked from many points of view, all legitimate and interesting, ranging from visual style to communication strategies, from business concerns to audience reception. Without ignoring any of these aspects, we pay particular attention to what food films can reveal about the production and negotiation of identity, relationships of power, and ultimately citizenship in contemporary U.S. society. More specifically, we focus on the connection between these media products and the cultural and social negotiations around class, gender, race, age, and political affiliation, even when at first blush they may seem unrelated to food and eating. Although these debates influence each other, allowing for the emergence of heated and contested identity politics, we focus on specific aspects of identity to provide a more accessible analysis, while making frequent references to their mutual connections. We zoom in on films released from the early 1990s to the present, a period that marks a watershed in the use and presence of food in media in general and cinema in particular. Are food films just harmless reflections of current trends, or do they rather participate in shaping them? Do they simply respond to the shifting interests of audiences, or are they at least partially responsible for generating those very preferences? Ultimately, to what degree do they influence our understanding of ourselves as individuals and as members of various communities?

Food has explicitly become part of how U.S. citizens talk about themselves. America, the New York Times wrote in 2009, is in the midst of a feeding frenzy.…The Food Network holds 65 million monthly viewers in its thrall, and sales of gourmet foods and beverages are expected to top $53 billion next year.¹ The marketability of food—its pervasive and lucrative representation on television and in magazines, advertising, film, and literature—and a plethora of self-help and cooking books suggest that narratives about eating constitute a highly contested arena in which cultural, social, economic, and political tensions converge. As with other kinds of consumption, food choices play an increasingly relevant role in defining the cultural stance, the social status, and the political worldviews of Americans. Shopping at a farmers’ market, patronizing a farm-to-table establishment, or buying one’s groceries at a local cooperative communicates specific information about individuals who embrace these behaviors. Eating at a fast-food restaurant on the way to the local big box store could be interpreted as the expression of a very different set of stances on issues ranging from labor to the environment. Along a varied and complex spectrum of values and actions, Americans adopt diverse and fragmented practices.

Academic and journalistic exposés into food production, consumption, and politics have received widespread attention. Eric Schlosser’s investigation into fast-food production structures, Marion Nestle’s uncovering of the complex connections among food, politics, and nutrition, and Michael Pollan’s exhortations to change the food system have set the stage for increasingly relevant conversations in civil society and in the media.² Specialized events such as the Food Film Festival in New York City and Charleston, South Carolina, San Francisco’s Food & Farm Film Fest, and many others confirm this increased visibility. The growing interest in food matters, both from a cultural and a political point of view, is part of larger global phenomena, as the presence of food festivals in Amsterdam, Seoul, and the Italian Alps suggest.³ Self-proclaimed foodies with solid financial backgrounds enjoy a cosmopolitan lifestyle that exposes them to restaurant and culinary trends all over the world, priming them to look for and appreciate food films, no matter their origin.

Yet the discussion about the nature and motivations of food films is still quite limited. Scholarly research has not frequently addressed the intricate connections among cinema, food, eating, identity, consumption, and their relationship to power and politics. In their engagement with liberal themes—including ideological pluralism, ethnic and racial acceptance, gender equality, and class flexibility—at face value food films seem to approach culture and identity through a critical and progressive lens. For instance, Big Night portrays the struggles of new immigrants trying to make it in the United States, while Julie & Julia lightly prods viewers to reflect on changes in gender roles. If, however, one pays enough attention to go beneath the surface, it quickly becomes clear that these films consistently undermine these progressive efforts by reasserting conventional approaches to nation, gender, race, sexuality, and social status. Mainstream media frequently enable dominant U.S. culture to celebrate its supposed commitment to diversity, while simultaneously positioning women and people of color as objects of consumption and pushing unruly and unsightly bodies—fat bodies, old bodies, disabled bodies, unfit bodies—to the margins. It comes as no surprise that the sort of films we examine emerged with the rise of liberal multiculturalism and ethnic identity politics in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s.⁴ Their complicated relationship to diversity mirrors the strategy of political correctness that promotes seemingly tolerant behavior and attitudes while undermining that very same progressiveness. Much food media purports to teach about otherness, but we have to consider how power operates along the lines of ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, and national identity within the United States when we take these lessons in. Indeed, our consumption of food media tends to render ethnicity as novel and exciting, while also ensuring that we as viewers engage with worlds that are safe and clean.

Despite the progressive veneer, food films may mask conservative politics, as the need for commercial success prevails over the ability to advance any effective social critique. Participating in the reproduction of the existing cultural and social order, food films play an important role in defining our sense of what is normal, natural, and appropriate, while keeping their mechanisms and strategies invisible. The virtual experience of eating while exploring different lifestyles and unfamiliar cultures provides audiences with seemingly safe and ordinary spaces to play out anxieties about racial differences, alternative sexualities, class distinctions, and all sorts of power issues. Food films, however, often end up highlighting consumption behaviors and lifestyles that privilege mainstream value systems while offering a virtual, vicarious touristic experience of various kinds of otherness. Food films help to draw lines between who does and does not belong to mainstream society, an issue central to any notion of citizenship.

Throughout this book we refer to the concepts of race and ethnicity. It is worth a brief discussion of these concepts in this introduction, without forgetting that they constantly interact, overlap, and often complicate issues of gender, class, and age. Race refers to the idea that groups of people can be differentiated from each other based on biological characteristics like skin color, hair texture, and facial and body structure.⁵ The term ethnicity, in contrast, categorizes groups of people based on cultural commonalities, like nationality, language, ancestry, and identification with each other. The way that we use the term ethnicity rejects the notion of a biological basis for race and therefore the idea that certain groups of people inherently embody particular traits because of their biology (for example, the stereotype that African Americans can dance or sing better than whites because of their biology). When we use the term race in this book, we are deliberately referring to the way the films themselves impose biologically deterministic characteristics on specific characters and groups. Our use of the term ethnic food implies a range of cuisines, and we deliberately contrast ethnic to mainstream white food, not because white people don’t have ethnic differences but rather because the films themselves demark white culture from the culture of nonwhite groups. We emphasize this because of the distinct privilege that whiteness holds in the United States.

Race and ethnicity issues cannot be fully appraised without examining their complex interplay with gender, which we approach as a cultural construction and a performance rather than a fixed position related to an individual’s biological sex. By doing this, we build on reflections that developed in the late 1960s, following and partly inspired by the civil right movement, when traditional gender relations were scrutinized and criticized by social movements that focused on the rights of oppressed members of society, such as blacks, women, and LGBT persons. Gender, patriarchy, family, and even sexual desire revealed their character of ideological formations. They reproduce the existing cultural and social order within institutions such as the state, the school, the workplace, and the military. Masculinity does not develop in absolute opposition to femininity but rather can be considered as the expression of a gender continuum that includes different, but sometimes overlapping, categories. In fact, different models of masculinity and femininity may prevail at certain points in time, but their dominance is always implicitly critiqued and even threatened by alternative gender models. Food films clearly indicate how food can become an arena where identities are negotiated, influencing the ways we perceive, represent, and perform ourselves as gendered individuals and as members of social groups.

These preliminary observations about food films lead us to argue that in the past two decades, food media, including movies, have become an important platform for the formation and contestation of U.S. American identity. What is the context in which these films emerged? How are they connected to broader cultural trends related to food?

A BRIEF ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE FOOD FILM

Although the films discussed in this project were produced and distributed between the early 1990s and 2015, food has appeared in cinema since its inception. One of the first films, the 1895 Le repas du Bebé by the brothers Lumière, focused on the meal of a baby, surrounded by its attentive parents. In silent movies food often served as a pretext for physical action: characters throwing whipped-cream pies at each other or slipping on banana peels offered opportunities for visual comedy at a time when audiences were not yet entertained by the actors’ voices.⁶ Even then, food managed to steal the spotlight. D. W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat, produced in 1909, focused on how stock market control over wheat led to the exploitation of farmers and the destruction of the social fabric in rural U.S. areas. The production, sale, and consumption of food connect the six tableaux that form the fifteen-minute silent film, offering a political commentary about social inequalities. In an unforgettable scene a ruthless finance tycoon falls into a wheat chute and is suffocated by the very goods on which he built his financial empire. Later, in Charlie Chaplin’s 1925 Gold Rush, the main character famously cooks and eats a shoe, establishing an iconic image that still reverberates today. In Modern Times (Chaplin, 1936) Chaplin makes us laugh and think by showing us a worker disastrously force-fed by a machine meant to save time and increase efficiency. As it focuses on a blue-collar male being stripped of his agency and autonomy, the scene hints at social class and gender identity issues.

Although U.S. filmmakers were aware of its dramatic potential as symbol or metaphor, food was seldom used as more than a prop, also owing to cost and logistic complications. Commensality—from dinners to drinks at a bar—offered filmmakers and scriptwriters the opportunity to have their characters convene and talk with each other, providing important information about themselves and the story. Food served as a transitional device; when we see somebody starting to eat, the camera then cuts to an empty plate.⁷ The representation of food objects and practices from specific times and places also provided elements of realism. Yet despite its recurring presence, food was seldom the protagonist. It was expensive and tedious to prepare appetizing-looking food that could appear consistently enough to maintain the illusion of reality across the many takes required to shoot a scene. Besides, actors loathed eating again and again for each take.⁸

Some notable exceptions appeared before the emergence of food films in the late 1980s, mostly outside the States. In Tom Jones (Richardson, 1962) the male protagonist and his female counterpart engage in the consumption of an abundant meal as a sensual, albeit unusual, form of courtship. The two characters gnaw bones clean and slurp oysters as an introduction to more carnal pleasures. In the 1970s, food appeared in European movies as a symbol of the moral bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie, touching at the same time on social class and gender issues. In his 1973 La grande bouffe Marco Ferreri depicted eating in wealthy social contexts as obsession and overindulgence, closely related to gender exploitation, to the extreme of self-destruction. In Sweet Movie (Makavejev, 1974) the revolutionary Anna, who makes candy in her boat while sailing through the canals of her city, uses her confections to seduce young boys, whom she then destroys. Food and eating appear in black comedies such as Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? (Kotcheff, 1978), in which chefs are killed in ways inspired by their most famous dishes. A conspicuous absence of food marks Luis Buñuel’s 1972 Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie, in which a meal is consistently postponed to the point where food never actually appears. In doing so, the filmmaker uses food as a vehicle for social criticism to denounce the inconsistencies and the limits of bourgeois sensibilities. In all these European works, food cannot be isolated from intricate and mutually influencing issues of class, gender, and age, while race does not emerge yet as an urgent topic.

The 1980s films that focus on cooking and eating, often viewed as the founding works of the new food film